1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to performing data backup operations across a computer network.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The creation and value of personal digital content is dramatically increasing as people acquire new digital devices. In private households and in businesses, there are increasingly large collections of digital data. Digital photos stored on a PC have replaced shoeboxes full of family photos. Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 (MP3) music collections have displaced shelves of Compact Discs (CDs) or vinyl records. Digital video and Personal Video Recorder (PVR)-recorded television are poised to replace videotape collections. The devices generating the digital files have become more sophisticated and therefore the resultant data file sizes have become significantly larger. The amount of digital data that people have has risen dramatically in recent years and, with this rise, there has been an attendant increase in the need for simple data backup.
The revolution in digital data has swept through faster than backup options have been able to mature. Personal Computer (PC) storage has notorious vulnerabilities. Almost everyone who owns a PC has experienced the loss of data.
Existing backup solutions, developed mostly for the corporate market, are expensive, bulky and overly complicated. For an everyday consumer the electronic data backup process is not easy and not everyone is technically savvy enough to use the current backup products. A need exists for an extremely simple, fully automated, and affordable backup appliance for digital data. Considering the impact of possibly losing irreplaceable family photos and documents due to computer failures, virus, theft or disasters, a user may want to have a copy of personal electronic data files in another device or location. Storing data with an online service provider is one option to have data redundancy or having a central device connected to the local area network is another option.
Thus one strategy for data backup is to use online data storage backup services offered by companies offering remote data storage facilities. In this way, instead of making copies of data locally, a user can opt to have the backed up data stored on a remote server using the interact for file transfer. Typically the user is required to sign up with a service provider and pay a monthly fee for storage of the backed up data or to obtain a copy of the backed up data for purposes of restoring lost or damaged data. It also requires having to install the provider's software and high speed internet connectivity to facilitate the rapid transfer of files. These services typically charge monthly or yearly fees based on the amount of data being backed up. While there are advantages to the online remote backup since the servers are located away from the home with lower risk of losing data to theft or disaster, such services can be a very expensive option for large amounts of data.
In a case where a user has multiple computers and wants to back them up there are some ways, though none that are very convenient. One example is having an external hard drive based backup device that connects to the computer via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port and may have backup software on the backup drive itself. Thus a user can connect the backup device to the computer and it will be backed up to the device. But in the case of multiple computers the user is required to carry out this process with each of the computers one after the other. Thus if a user forgets to connect the backup device to a particular computer for an extended duration and the computer fails the data that was created during this period is lost.
Alternatively, a user may want to backup all data from different computers in an office or home to one central but local device so that data can be uniformly accessed from any computer. Typically a Network Attached Storage (NAS) fills this role by being plugged into the Ethernet port of the router of a local area network. A traditional NAS device is relatively expensive and requires complicated configuration. Further, it requires that the accompanying software be installed on each of the computers connected to the local area network (LAN) that need to be backed up.
A NAS unit is essentially a self-contained stripped down computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose of providing data storage services to other devices on the network. NAS units usually do not have a keyboard or display, and are controlled and configured over the network, often by connecting via an internet browser to their network (IP) address. A general-purpose operating system is not needed on a NAS device, and often minimal-functionality or stripped-down operating systems are used instead.
The NAS contains a network card with an Ethernet port which allows it to be connected to an Ethernet port of a router. A NAS maintains its own Internet Protocol (IP) address comparable to a computer and other Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) devices. Using a software program that normally is provided together with the NAS hardware, a user can set up automatic or manual backups and file copies between the NAS and other network connected computers.
Additionally the software installed on each computer to be backed up needs to be manually configured in terms of specifying where the data to be backed up is located, what data is to be backed up and how often to backup the data.
What is needed therefore is a simplified data backup solution that can backup one or more the computers without requiring all the cost, complexity and user input of known solutions.